Sheathing

We are now more than half way through installing the sheathing on the two story section.

The sheathing is made up of 1x8 tongue and groove pine boards that are nailed to the outside of the posts. This part is fun because it goes up quickly, and because it isn’t quite as fiddly as decking. That’s because the joints are going to be hidden under insulation and siding, so the lengths don’t have to be precise.

There are some tricky parts to this step, though. We make sure the boards are pulled down when nailing so there aren’t any unsightly gaps visible from inside the house. We rip the tongues off of boards that can’t be full width (e.g., below window openings). Also, because the sheathing becomes the inside walls, we try to choose boards that will look good from inside. The wood is knotty pine, and some of the knots make interesting patterns. My background as the son of two biologists causes me to see some of these knots as microscopic creatures like paramecia or amoebae.

Before the sheathing could be put up, we had to frame the rough openings for the windows. This is a pretty straightforward task. On the long sides of the house, the openings are made with two 2x4s toe-nailed between posts. On the shorts sides, where there are no posts, it’s more work: a frame has to be constructed from a two-board thick sandwich of vertical and horizontal 2x4s, and the vertical boards are attached to the beams above and below with nailing plates. This framing is one of those parts of the construction process that isn’t described clearly in the instruction book, but is easy to understand once you make a couple of them.